Mages, ten-man raiding, and other things that are awesome.

Just this past Tuesday, I finally gathered enough Titan Runestones to proceed to the next stage of the legendary quest chain. Omitting any plot spoilers for folks who don’t like that kind of thing, the next stage involves one of four challenges issued by a Celestial. Each challenge is specific to the Celestial in question, and you only need to do one of them. There’s tanking, healing, ranged and melee DPS challenges. Naturally, being a pure (awesome) class, mages will be doing the ranged DPS challenge.

I’ll admit it here to my great shame: This challenge wasn’t easy. It took me a long time. I am a fully normal-geared raider, I’ve cleared ToT and my ilevel is 530. I also think I’m not generally terrible as a mage, but I really struggled. I died, and died, and died again. There was a shadow priest there doing it at the same time as I was, and we ended up whispering to each other eventually. You can tell someone else is dying because the challenge is instanced, so you ring a gong and disappear. When you die ignominiously, you show up again at Yu’lon’s feet. This shadow priest and I kept running into each other again and again. At first I was embarrassed, then secretly relieved that I wasn’t the only one having such a hard time.

I pulled out the guild bank and took flasks and more potions and some Banquets of the Oven that nobody cares about. I had long since abandoned my purist “I’ll defeat this challenge without outside help” attitude and alt-tabbed out to see what Wowhead and other people had to say. The strat most people seemed to recommend was one that allowed you to ignore most of the mechanics. This was so prevalent that it was tough to find any other information about the fight. I did try this method but it didn’t seem to work and I resolved to do it my own way.

Here’s how the fight goes. You’ll want to stop reading at this point if you’d prefer not to know.

Yu’lon suggests that power without wisdom to guide it is a bad idea. She tells Wrathion this and he scoffs, at which point she suggests that I should fight Wrathion to prove her point. He of course immediately refuses (“I would annihilate my own champion!”) but then she drops the other shoe: he’ll be fighting me blindfolded. It’s a little insulting, but I suppose it is the only way a fight between a black dragon and a single person could possibly be even. So he agrees, and that’s how the fight goes – Wrathion is blindfolded.

Throughout the course of the challenge, he’ll use several abilities to try and locate you. A frontal cone (ground) attack, a large circle of fire, a “rain of fire” type ability, and a series of small ooze adds. Later in the fight he also conjures many copies of himself (Mirror Images writ large!) that you must kill before they complete their cast of a spell called Inferno because it hurts a great deal.

Other key elements of the fight: Wrathion takes triple damage if hit from behind. You can use to your great advantage if you time your CDs when you are able to step behind him. After he casts his frontal cone attack, he’ll shout “A-HA!” and then rush at you. Wrathion does no melee damage so there’s no risk to you by being near him. At first I was instinctively running away from him too but you lose valuable DPS time this way and there’s no benefit to it. Just strafe to the side out of the cone, get behind him quickly if you can and attack him there. I’d suggest setting Wrathion as your focus target so that you can always cast a few quick spells at him, because…

The hardest part of the fight is his ooze adds. You cannot take more than a few hits from any of them before dying horribly. They also buff themselves the longer they are alive, gain a movement speed buff, and continue to chase you. They are susceptible to stuns, slows, and CC, so I suggest you use all of this to your adventure. I did the challenge as a Frost mage, using my WE’s freeze to lock the adds down while kiting them around. The other thing that really made the difference for me in this fight was swapping out the Cone of Cold glyph in exchange for Glyph of Arcane explosion. A combination of Flamestrike, a few Living Bombs on the adds and glyphed AE was enough to kill them relatively quickly. Without the extra five yards from the glyph, you have to get dangerously close to melee range from the quick-moving oozes.

Talents I used Ice Floes, Ice Barrier, Ring of Frost, Cauterize, Living Bomb, and Incanter’s Ward. An argument could definitely be made for using Blazing Speed if you prefer, and Ice Ward in place of RoF except it requires something to hit you in order to activate and we’re trying to keep these oozes from hitting us. Cauterize can save your bacon at least once during the fight and is highly recommended. You could also use Nether Tempest instead of Living Bomb, I chose LB for its superior single target damage because I wanted to hurt Wrathion as much as I could while I was DPSing the oozes. NT’s no target limit and superior AoE damage is nice though and could likely have worked just as well.

The last talent choice to use Incanter’s Ward instead of Invocation is another personal thing. The damage mitigation is very valuable here, and time to stand and evocate is precious. I found that evocating was interfering with my kiting, so I switched.

Glyphs Glyph of Arcane Explosion is recommended for all specs. Those extra five yards makes this much, much easier. As a Frost mage I used Glyph of AE, Ice Lance, and Water Elemental.

Strategy Put yourself behind Wrathion to start the fight. He’ll always be facing towards Yu’lon. You have the option of using Time Warp at the beginning or saving it for later when you’re a bit desperate and things are getting hairy. I’d suggest pre-potting as well – front-load your damage as much as you can. If you are Fire, try to line up a good Combustion ASAP and hit Wrathion with it very early on. He’ll cast 1-2 of his frontal cone abilities, and possibly his rain of fire thing. You can tell where the fire is falling because it casts a dark shadow on the ground – be someplace else. Ice Floes is nice for this time because you can keep DPSing him while dodging around. He usually spawns the oozes about 10-20 seconds into the fight. They will mill around aimlessly in a group for about three seconds and then they will start heading towards you.

You must not let them reach you. Do whatever it takes to achieve this – You can start off with a Ring of Frost to freeze them in place and gain a few valuable seconds of lead time on your DPS. Remember, the longer they live, the faster they get. You must also DPS the oozes while Wrathion is doing his best to hurt you. Blink, of course, is helpful but it’s not available often enough on its own. Having the extra freeze from the Water Elemental and your own Frost Nova helps a ton. Let them get just close enough and then Frost Nova them. Put either Living Bomb or Nether Tempest on them and then run a bit. Try to hit Wrathion as you run by him. Try to drop a Flamestrike and then Arcane Explosion as much as you can (bonus: it will hit Wrathion too).

Once the oozes are dead, they are out of the fight for a little while…but here’s the kicker. You can’t ever really kill them. They will respawn. Also, they will respawn from the position they died at, so try not to be anywhere near their bodies when this happens. Meantime, Wrathion will be casting his next big ability – he will fill the room with duplicates of himself. Use Arcane Explosion to kill them QUICKLY. If you fail to kill them, they’ll cast Inferno. You can likely survive a few Infernos but the entire room doing them will spell your demise. He will summon two rounds of these, but you should be able to make quick work of them.

At this point, unfortunately, depending on when you killed them – oozes are going to begin respawning and chasing you. In a way, you’re fighting a battle against time because you have to defeat Wrathion but the oozes could be a full-time distraction if you let them. Continue to DPS Wrathion whenever possible, especially after the first wave of oozes dies and before they’re able to respawn. Kill them again when they respawn and try to take Wrathion down. This would be a good time for that Time Warp if you didn’t use it earlier. Use another potion. Blow him to smithereens!

I found that even DPSing Wrathion any time rather than waiting until you are behind him still added up significantly over time. Cleave from Ice Lance or other AoE will also damage him a bit. If you can survive the two ooze phases you should be in the clear for finishing Wrathion. Don’t lose sight of your goal and try to stay calm. Once you get the hang of the ooze adds you’re well on your way.

This is a good Fire mage point of view for this fight. You’ll see he takes the adds out using a combination of Nether Tempest and single target/Pyroblast procs. He also stuck with Invocation and opted to use Time Warp after the second set of oozes has died. There’s really no wrong choice of talent or strategy, just what works for you personally.

Note: the method recommended by many casters for this fight is to spec into Greater Invisibility or some other aggro dump and head out to the balcony railing when the oozes spawn, using your invisibility. The idea is that the oozes will just hang out inside the temple and never attack you at all. I did try this just to see if it would keep me from tearing my hair out, but I didn’t find it worked. After my invisibility expired, the oozes headed straight out onto the balcony for me. Moreover, they also became impossible to kill because they’d been alive so long. It didn’t end well. The balcony strat is also supposed to allow you to ignore the mirror images that spawn. I’m not sure if this has been hotfixed, but it wasn’t a viable method when I attempted it.

I’m happy to have done it “as intended” anyway. I will give you one last tip, though – make sure you check the status of your gear. If you’ve been wiping over and over (and the wipes pile up quickly, much like my unfortunate corpse) you can find your gear destroyed in short order. At some point I took a break for supper, came back and had a really good attempt – yesss! I’m finally getting the hang of this! Then I did progressively worse and I couldn’t figure out why, until I looked at my gear, which was entirely and completely red. Effectively, I’d been DPSing Wrathion naked. Hey, at least he was blindfolded!

Good luck with this challenge, even if it’s tough, you can do it! If you have tips or tricks I didn’t think of here, please leave them in the comments! Unless your “tip” is “I one-shot this! It was so easy.” If you’re that guy I don’t want to hear from you.

Comments on: "Celestial Blessings – Yu’lon Edition For Mages" (18)

This sounds like it would be a pretty fun one. Though I’m imagining doing this on my hunter (which won’t happen anytime soon) and groaning at the steady/frequent AoE requirement. Not a good situation for BM hunters! I think I’d have a really difficult time with this. Nice job figuring it out though! (The REAL way!)

Congrats, Vid! I had fun with this too! My first run at it I failed spectacularly as a BM hunter so I switched to Survival.

As a hunter, I think it’s significantly easier to run as Survival. We have to do the same Yu’lon challenge as other ranged DPS, Xuen doesn’t want to work with us. That’s interesting, because as far as I can tell, the Xuen and Yu’lon challenges are identical. Same slimes, cone attack, images and so on. Lots of melee HATE those slimes!

Survival hunters are really well equipped for this though. The large AoE slow from the Ice Trap, plus the 4s root from Survival spec makes the slimes substantially easier to deal with. A couple Multi-Shots, an Explosive trap in the ice (they’re not moving anyway!) and a Barrage takes them out quickly. (Gear is of course a factor. I was 530 when I did it a week ago.) I found it best to wait to drop the trap until they started moving towards me. Once I dropped it early, but then got out of position by Wrathion coming after me with his cleave. The Slimes avoided the trap and I died fast. So long as they get in the Ice, they’re pretty easy to deal with. Just that probably made this a lot easier for me.

I highly recommend setting Wrathion and your focus target and a good interrupt macro to keep him from casting the Blood of the Deathborn spell. Barrage was also fantastically useful for killing the mirror images. It takes them out super fast. Multi-shot also does well. For talents, any hunter should definitely have Silencing Shot, Spirit Bond and Barrage. The other three tiers are likely fine with whatever, but I prefer Fervor, Crows and CTHC. For glyphs, Animal Bond, Liberation and Ice Trap. That layout gives hunters fairly good self-healing, but we shouldn’t take much damage anyway.

Rades, if you’re gonna stick with BM, it’ll be tougher since the pet is important for AoE. Key would be getting initial slime aggro on yourself then sending the pet in to cleave. Oh, Glyph of Endless Wrath would work well for that! Most of the rest should be similar. Actually, BM DPS on Wrathion might be higher since the pet would always be behind him.

Well there ya go, Vid! Some tips for any hunter readers you might have. 🙂

Nothing shameful about it: that challenge is *hard*. It kicked my ass up and down for quite a while. Those oozes are pure, distilled murder in blob form. I eventually had to come back and make the recommended strat work, after much trial and error since I don’t have an aggro dump to facilitate it.

Okay, I haven’t really done anything about the Legendary beyond getting the initial quest. But still, I wanted to pop in and say congrats!

And now I know where the insane health from some of these BG runners comes from: if you’re fully normal raid geared at iL530, that’s significantly higher than most of the Conquest PvP gear out right now. I saw a Warlock with well over 570k health in a BG recently, and I thought that was just nuts.

Blizz actually nerfs iL in BGs now, so you never see anything that high. However, they also give everybody a base of 65% resilience, so that 500-600k tank in AV in PvE gear is a lot harder to zap than in prior expacs.

Well, I am not a native english speaker, but I am happy to say that I made it with full LFR gear.
I did it as a fire, you can burst a nice combo if you hit him from behind using all your CDs and with Glyph of Combustion your damage get a lot insane!
But then and again there is oozes, after many wipes, I tried to use Invisibility… and it worked! Of course Wrathion was getting those nasty Mirror Image but if you stay in the balcony long enough after you used your invisibility, the oozes woun’t chase you and he will eventually come back to get his draconic arse kicked.
Repeat until win 😀

Thx for this. It’s great to read what the DPS’ers had to do as I only did the healer challenge. I would have loved to try the other challenges (like in Proving Grounds) but I was determined to do mine as Disc.

That’s interesting, I did the Xuen challenge on my WW monk and it sounds like the exact same fight (cone attack, more damage from the back, oozes to kite/kill, mirror images… I don’t remember a rain of fire attack but I may have just blocked it out of my mind).

I’m pretty good on my monk, I thought, and had mid-i520ish gear at the time so should have had plenty of gear but I was having trouble getting him past 50% health, I was getting basically no uptime on attacking him due to having to spend so much time killing (&/or avoiding) oozes (and killing them as a melee isn’t fun when they hit as hard as they do, they have a pretty big hit box but the increasing speed makes that really hard to be perfect with over a loooong fight).

My first positive step was to put a Storm, Earth and Fire clone on Wrathion and solely focused on the oozes. That worked okay but wasn’t really helping anything, I was doing less dps and oozes were still eventually killing me when I got a wee bit sloppy. Then I realized I could put a second SEF on the oozes… and just be out of range of everything, spinning crane kicking air and letting my SEFs do all the work, and eventually everything would die.

20 minutes later, everything was dead. Not sure if that’s what I’d call a supported technique… but it worked. I did feel a bit dirty afterwards, though. I still have no idea how a dps warrior is doing that fight.

Try that challenge on a rogue. It is a NIGHTMARE. There is a fire patch thing – tears of neltharion or whatever – but melee are generally running so hard from the blobs that it doesn’t actually matter.

I tried the challenge as Ret, then wussed out after an hour or so and went and 1-shot the tank challenge. In my DPS gear, with a 450 weapon and an unenchanted shield. Suspect that’s how warriors are getting their legendaries.

congrats on completing this. I looked up the strats beforehand and first thought…oh no, i’m not using the balcony. I’m doing this the right way. Few deaths later…balcony looking pretty good. The first time I used the invis and run to the balcony method, I made the mistake of wandering too close to the stairs going into the room because he had his mirror images up and it seemed to take forever for them to despawn. This caused everything to aggro on me again and I…died. Blood and brains everywhere. 2nd time, I made sure to keep clear of the stairs no matter how curious I got about what was happening in the room. Eventually he did come back out to the balcony. This time, it was just avoid Wrathion’s attacks and pew pew. Win. I would have liked to have done it “as intended” but did not want to spend a full day over there. lol Lazy, mage is lazy.

Hi! I just managed to beat the crap out of Wrathion (after more attempts than I care to admit) and I am very excited… Being a fire mage really didn’t help at all with this quest, but I figured out a small strategy and hopefully it will help you as well… After the first wave of the oozes, I let Wrathion get close to me and released my Mirror Images. I got as far away as I could, drank a potion of the Jade Spirit, casted Time Warp and burned the hell out of Wrathion as he was too busy poking around the Mirror Images. Afterwards, his health was low enough to handle.

I had a really hard time with this fight as a frost mage. I died countless times. Switching from Glyph of Ice Lance to Glyph of Arcane Explosion, and respecting from Frost Bomb into Living Bomb was all it took. I one shotted Yu’lon after making those changes. Thank you for your helpful post!